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The DataCAD Developer Network (DDN) is an online resource for information and support for DCAL® (DataCAD Applications Language) developers as well as anyone interested in creating fonts, toolbars, hatch patterns, or linetypes for use in DataCAD.

I'm pleased to announce the availability of the first draft edition of the remastered DCAL manual. Please feel free to download this document and post your comments, corrections, and additions here on this forum.

I'm busy here preparing the first release of LT 12 in portuguese, and almost didn't realize that you're about to make an unannounced kick-off for a new enterprise to be explored: the development of applications with DCAL on all its flavours.

Are you considering to make a refresh on the Tutorial as well ?
Or may be the Manual could embed the tutorial on it ?

Thanks for this new great endeavour.
I can foresee many things happening over this frontier.

The description of how to compile the sample macros needs to be updated. It still lists the directory structure starting at MTEC. (That hasn't been used since version 4) The whole structure listed is out of date. I would think this section should be updated to include a description of how to create path statements to the compiler and how to compile a macro without the use of the go.bat files (or at least a description of what the go.bat is doing).

I may have missed it but, I saw very little mention of the include files. There should be more about what they do and how to use them.

Hi Mark,I have come across a few errors in the DCAL manual over the years, but have not always made not of them. But here are a couple of things that need fixing (based on the manual that I downloaded as part of the DataCAD 18 evaluation program last year):

1.The manual still has the user fields (user0 thru user3) in the entity definition. I believe these fields were renamed over 20 years ago. The new names would imply that the fields are no longer available to the macro writer (although as far as I know this has never been stated).

2. The example code under disfrompolyvert (page 131) has invalid code for the polyvert_get call (it does not include the frst and last parameters).

A few more corrections that could be made to the DCAL manual if you update it again:

The definition of msg_dlg on page 213 is incorrect. It is missing a type for the msgDlgType parameter (should be integer)

In the Hatch sample program, several of the strings are missing one or both quotes (starting on page 180).

In the description of ExecAndWait (page214):- it says that visibility values are defined in show_wdw.inc, but I cannot find this file anywhere in my Datacad installation.- mention is made of an ExecProg function, but ExecProg is not documented anywhere that I can find (nor is it defined in any of the include files).

In the getmode example (p78-79) the code uses a variable named 'move' in the getmode call, but then uses a variable named 'mode' in the subsequent lines.

lyr_create (p117-118). Talks about the return value of 'lyr_clear'. It should be 'lyr_create'.

in the description of min & max parameters to mode_hatch (p166), it refers to ent_extents procedure. It should be ent_extent (without the s)